Relationship scoring

Introduction

Relationship scoring is a process which counts emails exchanged and appointments made by an employee with a contact and assigns a score to each interaction, as an indication of how well the employee knows the contact. A score for the strength of their personal relationship can also be manually captured eg if they are a family member or a friend. When this is done for everyone in the organisation, it quickly becomes clear who interacts most frequently with the contact.

There is also functionality that will reduce the score so that the score emphasises more recent interactions. The degradation of scores is entirely optional and configurable.

Configuration

There are two aspects to the configuration of relationship scoring: the scores for email and appointments and their degradation over time. To access the configuration screen, go to the “Empower Contacts” area and select “Global Configuration” option from the menu.

Scoring	Degradation

Presentation

Relationships and their scores are shown on several screens:

Active Relationships
The “Active Relationships” screen lists all active relationships that exist between employees and contacts. The list is easily filterable; useful because it is likely to be a long list in a production environment.

Relationship details

Selecting an active relationship allows you to view and edit the details of the relationship. it also displays the breakdown of the score.

This screen allows several actions to be performed:

• Recalculate scores
• Setting up a personal relationship with the contact
• Create a scoreable event
• Review existing scores

To recalculate a score manually, click the calculator icon next to the score. A new “Recalculate” link will appear. Click it to update the score

Personal relationships between an employee and contact can be valuable in developing new business. They can also highlight possible conflicts when taking on new work or building fee-earning teams. This feature allows an employee to report a personal relationship with a contact. There are three fields to complete:

• Type – personal friend, family member, other
• Relationship level – a value between 1 and 10
• How long you have known the person, in years

The score is the product of level and years eg someone with a relationship level of 7, known for 5 years will have a score of 35:

Three types of event can be created manually: email, appointment and phone call. Note that phone calls are not scored.